Description

“...labels are inadequate, but they fall away in the face of this severe yet majestic movie. Nothing can quite prepare the first-time viewer for the force of Ms. Akerman's concentration, for the film's overwhelming concreteness or the horrifying logic of its ending." - Dennis Lim, The New York Times

“It's as claustrophobic, psychologically penetrating, and exactingly-direct an apartment film as anything Roman Polanski has made. That it takes 200 minutes to watch is almost besides the point. The more you give yourself over to it...the tighter its hold." - Scotty Nye, Criterioncast

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, qua du Commerce, 1080 Bruxxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occassional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman's film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema's most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades. Notably, Akerman worked with an almost all female crew, including cinematographer Babette Mangolte and made the film when she was just 25 year old.